History & CultureHow it works
How a monk turned a hymn into "do re mi".
In the 11th century Guido of Arezzo used the hymn "Ut queant laxis": each of its first six half-lines starts one scale step higher. Their opening syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la became the note names – a mnemonic with the scale built into it. Giovanni Battista Doni later replaced ut with the more open do.
Useful: The best mnemonic is one whose structure already mirrors the thing itself.
Source: en.wikipedia.org